Or did he really believe he could, even now, revive a revolutionary, 1960s self-image as a glorious leader, an Arab Fidel Castro?

His speech certainly had the length – an hour and a quarter – but there was no audience, and to his people he must have seemed more like a lonely old man ranting on a street corner than their pillar of strength, the bold and original leader that he clearly believes himself still to be.

Indeed, before he entered his stride, he repeated himself without making sense, just tumbling out confused revolutionary catchphrases about the "superpowers", the "rats and cats" ranged against him, civil war, death and retribution.

There was a script, but he seemed to veer from it, often stopping and looking lost as he tried to find his place.

Behind him lay the House of Strength, a museum to the 1986 US bombing raid on Tripoli that tried to kill him. It is the preserved compound where his four-year-old adopted daughter, Hannah, was killed. Outside is a Socialist Realist sculpture of a fist crushing an American warplane.

But were it not for that image, the viewer would have thought he were trapped inside one of the many wrecked buildings now littering his once proud revolutionary realm.

The communist writer Brecht famously said of the East German regime that "the people having lost the confidence of the government, the government has decided to dissolve the people, and to appoint another one."

Col. Gaddafi last night decided to follow suit. Like Presidents Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt before him, he made vague promises of reform but went much further in what was on offer if these promises were not accepted by the vast numbers ranged against him.

"Capture the rats," he ordered his followers. "Go out of your homes and storm them."

He turned to his Green Book, the instructions he wrote for his people more than three decades ago. He said those protesting against his rule were fomenting a civil war, and added: "The sentence for waging civil war is death."

It was a ludicrous spectacle. But Col. Gaddafi has one thing on his side, which his neighbours to the west and east did not: everyone already knew, and the Libyan people have shown this week that they also always knew, that there was something ludicrous about the spectacle of Col. Gaddafi.

It has not stopped him ruling for 40 years, and he now has the key advantage of possession. Far from being in Venezuela, or even in his desert stronghold in the south, he remains in Tripoli. He may be mad, but he remains dangerous, and it is not clear what force it will take to dislodge him.